How Forgiveness Can Heal Your Relationship With Food
Are you sick and tired of having bad food days that send you into a negative spiral?
Maybe you’re trying to stop binge eating but you slipped up again. So screw it, you’re going to finish whatever’s in the house so you can have a fresh start.
Or maybe you’re trying to gradually eat more, but keep putting off that calorie increase until…the day is over and you let the voices in your head promising you can start over tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.
Getting stuck in the cycle of good days-bad days-good days-bad days is SO frustrating, and can feel like you’re never making forward progress.
Then when you’re off-track, you blame yourself…
…for getting yourself into this mess in the first place…
…for needing to work extra hard to break the cycle…
…and for the lack of progress in fixing the problem.
So you end up marinating in this rancid soup of hopelessness, anger, and shame for being the victim of your impulses.
It can feel like a nightmare you just want to wake up from.
So what’s actually going on? Why are you struggling to be consistent with food in the first place?
On the face of it, you’re doing everything right.
But when your self-critic keeps dogging you, asking, “Why can’t you be stronger? What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be like everyone else?” it can feel like you’re letting yourself down, over and over again.
My friend, what you’re missing is forgiveness.
Specifically, self-forgiveness.
Some things our Food Body Self students have forgiven themselves for include: binge eating, emotional eating, negative self-talk, believing things that bullies said, making excuses.
You may not feel ready to forgive yourself, and that’s okay. But when you do, you can increase your confidence and hopefulness, and reduce depression and anger.
On the flip side, not being able to forgive is a risk factor for heart disease, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, insomnia, ulcers, migraines, back aches, heart attacks, cancer and other chronic stress-related illnesses.[1]
Holding on to anger, hatred, and resentment, whether that's toward someone else or yourself, creates all of this distress that festers, leading to the health factors listed above.
The ability to forgive comes from the recognition that we’re all flawed. None of us are special. We are ALL screwing up.
So if you’re ready to face this challenge, here’s how to engage in the process of self-forgiveness, based on the steps in The Book of Forgiving, by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu:
Tell Your Story
In this first step, you’re going to tell the story of how you’ve been hurt in all of its glorious, messy, painful detail. What is the pain or regret these transgressions have caused you?
Tell the story to yourself or someone you trust. Say it out loud, write it down, or meditate on it. Get it out.
Make sure to include anything you believe was taken from you or that was lost: trust, faith, safety, dignity, innocence, hope, etc.
What emotions did this pain or loss cause you to feel?
Grant Forgiveness
The process of forgiving yourself is not necessarily going to be one-and-done. Often repetition is required, perhaps many times over. If the hurt is still reoccurring, you may need to continue engaging in forgiveness each time the wound is reopened.
For example, if you’re forgiving yourself for emotional eating and not being able to trust yourself around food, you may experience an episode that leads you to say, “See, I knew I couldn't trust myself. I knew I couldn't do this. It's not working.”
You want to jump all over the new transgression and dive back into the hurt and the lack of capability. And so the forgiveness needs to be unconditional and repeated.
Here are two ways to grant yourself forgiveness (I suggest trying them both, in this order):
Visualization
Close your eyes and take a couple of breaths, relaxing and imagining an emotion that feels really, really good to you. Love, passion, gratitude. Let the feeling build up and radiate out of you. Noticing that when you do this, you feel very peaceful, you’re in a place where neither fear, anger, resentment, nor hate are touching. And then realize that this soothing place is always accessible, always within you, and you can always return.
Create this warmth first, then imagine yourself as a tiny baby, seeing the goodness and the humanity in yourself, wishing yourself well. Sending yourself compassion and kindness.
When you look at a baby, you know it’s not a good person or a bad person, it's just a baby. Yet with adults, we have no problem making judgments. And even with older children and teenagers, we think that they're less deserving of this compassion and kindness because they “should” know better.
But I want to challenge that belief and say, if you think of yourself as a baby—and then think of yourself as one and then two and then three years old—where is that line between where you deserved forgiveness and where you stopped deserving forgiveness? Where you stopped deserving worthiness and love. Try to imagine a baby that doesn't deserve worthiness, belonging, compassion, love, and caring.
But we like to think somehow we’ve grown into these people that have stopped being worthy. See if you can connect to the idea that you’ve never stopped deserving forgiveness—because you haven’t.
Writing
In the first step, you told your story, which included how you were hurt, the emotions you felt, and what was lost along the way. Now you’re going to write down how the story has made you stronger, helped you grow, helped you develop empathy for others, or any other ways in which you feel you’ve benefited.
And in writing your story, even if you're not through it yet, even if the story isn't over, write yourself as the hero rather than as the victim. Consider how you either dealt with the problem or how you are dealing with it, how you have grown, how it could protect others, or how it could help others.
Renewing the Relationship
Renewing the relationship with yourself doesn’t mean going back to the way things were before. It doesn’t mean pretending that the transgression didn't happen or even expecting that it might not happen again.
Instead, you’re creating a newer, stronger relationship in which you're starting to own your story. This is how you can break the cycle of self-hate, punishment, and resentment and find a sense of internal peace.
Asking yourself, “What do I need to move forward?” Think about what your hopes and your fears are in this relationship with yourself.
A lack of forgiveness will affect your health, career, parenting, relationships, and your overall well being. Which is why Food Body Self doesn’t just focus on food or body image.
There is a massive “self” component because your relationship with yourself affects every aspect of your life.
When you hold onto self-blame, it keeps you stuck in the past, and thus limits the potential that you have in the present.
“When we make an identity out of our past actions, we deny ourselves the gift of transformation.”
– Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, p. 199
Forgiveness is one of the ways in which we can find personal freedom and growth.
You’re now more ready than most to achieve the freedom and growth you seek.
And this time has come to take this knowledge and act.
I know figuring all this stuff out alone can be struggle, which is exactly why I write these articles. But if you want to get there even quicker, check out the Food Body Self coaching program.
We all have good and bad characteristics inside of us. It is in our nature to hurt and to make mistakes. It is part of our nature to be flawed, but it is also part of our nature to reconcile, to rebuild, and to reconnect—to forgive.
To forgive yourself is to pick up these broken pieces and make something even stronger.
References
[1] Worthington, E. L., Jr, Witvliet, C. V., Pietrini, P., & Miller, A. J. (2007). Forgiveness, health, and well-being: a review of evidence for emotional versus decisional forgiveness, dispositional forgivingness, and reduced unforgiveness. Journal of behavioral medicine, 30(4), 291–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-007-9105-8
Tutu, D., & Tutu, M. (2014). The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World. HarperOne.